IMAGES OF WAR HITLER’S HEADQUARTERS 1939-1945

With news that the Poles are opening up one of Hitler’s headquarters for tourism, this timely new book offers a fascinating dip into the world of all the Fuhrer’s bunkers during his cataclysmic reign. It has everything you come to expect from Ian Baxter, with exceptional photographs and a very readable text.

I am often told “Don’t give up the day job!” and luckily mine is working in a vast photographic archive handling some stunning images, so I am always interested to see other collections put to use. As with other Baxter works the images in this book comprise both official and private photographs and how he amasses them I can only begin to guess. It is little realised that a great many war time personal pictures were not taken on cameras producing large format negatives and prints. They were usually of an inferior quality to the stuff we used to get when we kept it with Kodak. It is invariably the case that the original negatives will be long lost and reproducing images from prints which might only measure a few centimetres is an art in itself. So collating these images in a crisp style acceptable to modern eyes is something of a challenge.

This book will obviously appeal to anyone with a serious interest in German matters and it will compliment others in the series. I found the captions and general text informative and easy to follow and, all in all, this makes for a solid piece of work. The final chapter takes us to the Wolfschanze as it appears today and it will be this sort of image the modern visitor sees through the viewfinder of their digital camera or even on their phone. Time and technology march on, but our fascination with the power and the implosion of the Nazis remains constant.